


An Everyday General Intelligence System

by FlippedScript



Series: Spider-Man's New York Tour (AU) [7]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: BAMF Ned Leeds, Coming of Age, F/M, Gen, Hacking, Illegal Activities, Tech Jargon, but only slightly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25730635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlippedScript/pseuds/FlippedScript
Summary: By the end of Sophomore year, he can hack almost anything, including, for better or for worse, most of the traffic cameras in Queens. The video feeds help him get someawesomefootage of Spider-Man, and he’s pretty sure his efforts and the Spider-Watch Twitter account he sets up help propel Spider-Man to stardom faster than he would have otherwise. It’s pretty easy to crop snippets of sometimes-grainy videos to fifteen to twenty second clips, and to put the right couple hashtags to get them to go viral. He gets thirty thousand followers in three weeks.In which Ned Leeds learns to code, makes new friends, and (eventually), does some really, really cool things.
Relationships: Betty Brant/Ned Leeds, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds, Ned Leeds & Flash Thompson, Ned Leeds & Peter Parker
Series: Spider-Man's New York Tour (AU) [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1557637
Comments: 18
Kudos: 54





	1. Learning

When Ned was twelve, he decided that he was going to work at Stark Industries. Well, to be more accurate, he and Peter decided that the two of them would work at Stark Industries. Stark Industries was the coolest place ever, and they agreed that they would manage a pair of research labs next door to each other, and that they would live next to each other, too. Stark Industries was so cool because when Ned was eleven, Tony Stark started working less on missiles and more on disability tech and solar energy. (Stark Industries is still pretty cool, admittedly).

Of course, that isn’t something that’s going to happen. When Ned is thirteen, he realizes that the only type of science he actually likes is Computer Science, and that Stark Industries doesn’t put Computer Science labs next to any of the engineering ones Peter wants to work in. That doesn’t stop them from still making their secret handshake and agreeing that, even if they couldn’t work next door to each other they could still live next door.

And then Ned turns fourteen, and Peter’s Uncle dies, and Peter doesn’t come to school as often. By November, he stops coming at all. They still talk online, and send each other bad Star Wars memes on instagram because no one else will get them, but things keep coming up, and Peter seems to get busier and busier. Once he comes back from Christmas break, Ned is suddenly pretty sure that MJ (formerly Michelle) and Betty are his now best friends, and he talks to Flash about Spider-Man more than he ever talked to Peter about SI.

(Spider-Man was also what he bonded with Betty over the most, and the two of them are always quick to agree that they first got to know each other over hot chocolates, Ned’s first ever web scraping programs, and the first few drafts of their article.)

In sophomore year Ned continues to learn more about Computer Science, and learns to hack the school wifi to stop blocking reddit for the sake of it. He sells access to his “upgraded” wifi to a few students, before he’s cornered by Betty and MJ who scold him for it, and he refunds the money and shuts down the whole thing.

He keeps learning, though. By the end of Sophomore year, he can hack almost anything, including, for better or for worse, most of the traffic cameras in Queens. The video feeds help him get some _awesome_ footage of Spider-Man, and he’s pretty sure his efforts and the Spider-Watch Twitter account he sets up help propel Spider-Man to stardom faster than he would have otherwise. It’s pretty easy to crop snippets of sometimes-grainy videos to fifteen to twenty second clips, and to put the right couple hashtags to get them to go viral. He gets thirty thousand followers in three weeks.

Unfortunately, Betty and MJ have to sit him down _again_ and remind him that it isn’t particularly legal to hack traffic cameras. Since Ned has no interest in juvie, he relents. By the end of the summer he has turned over control of the account to a few ardent fans, tasking them to collect submissions or something, he’s not that invested in it.

Of course, this leaves Ned bored. So, so bored. He decides to analyze Queens crime data instead of hack their security cameras, and he sticks to the publicly available stuff.

He does all of this mostly because he can, but also because school is boring and he wants to know more about Spider-Man. He's never claimed to be a complex man, he likes cool things, and Spider-Man is much cooler than school. His eventual goal is to figure out where in the city Spider-Man arrives fastest on average (and okay, this will probably require like, two years of data, and probably won’t work, but it’s a cool thought). Potentially, that can help him figure out where Spider-Man lives or works, which would be neat.

Unfortunately, to do all of that he needs to store and categorize every crime in New York on his own machine though, and there is a _lot_ of crime in New York. Which means he'll definitely want to upgrade his computer, and dev tools can be expensive, and the free AWS trial he needs doesn’t handle nearly as much as he wants it to. So Ned does the math, which was probably not a great way to motivate himself, because it turns out he’ll needs to find a way to make about two and a half grand over spring break. He also refuses to get a part time job, because he would suck at them, and as exciting as it sounds to make heat maps of Spider-Man sightings, that fails to outweigh the pain that would be bagging groceries.

So instead Ned does what he always does when he has to solve a problem, and codes his way through it. His break is a flurry of reading guides and documentation and hammering out hundreds of lines of code only to rewrite and rename and refactor half of them the next day, and he sleeps for _maybe_ four and a half hours a night. They aren’t the healthiest habits, but he still does chores around the house (even if they’re at half speed because he’s more focused on class design) and he eats the sliced fruit his mom puts at his desk while he works.

He feels like he’s a mostly competent human being, even if he falls asleep at his desk more often than his bed, his eyes ignoring the dim glow of his monitors because they’ve seen little else that day. His computer falls asleep eventually, but he wakes up when the first rays of sun shine on his faceand turns them back on. He keeps his documentation on one, his code on the second, and a chat with Betty on the third. (She’s learning a little programming, and he thinks that’s super cool of her. He makes sure to tell her that often, and she’s always very pleased to hear that).

In the end, he does finish what he wanted to, and early. He already knows how to interact with twitter, and from there it’s just setting up a PayPal and Selenium and a cloud server instance and all of the sudden he can place or sell a sports bet a second or two after new news leaks. Ideally he can place a winning bet before the odds change, and it’s not a perfect system, but it’s almost guaranteed to profit in the long term. Seeing as how there are a lot of bets to place in March, the long term is the short term, and he leaves it running running for a week, finally letting himself fall asleep in his bed. And while Ned sleeps for eighteen hours a day for the last few days of break, dozens of multithreaded functions read thousands of tweets a minute, and it works - he splits the difference on a bet and doubles a few pennies a few hundred times. It’ll add up fast, Ned is pretty sure, but he isn’t as good at exponents as he probably should be, and he’s too tired to care. If he loses the ten bucks he started with, it was still a lot of fun.

Instead, the doubling adds up faster than he expected, fortunately, and Ned makes all the upgrades to his computer rig he wants, and then a few more, and then anonymously donates the rest of the money to FEAST and a few other charities. When he gets back to school after break, things feel normal again. He more or less disappeared on everyone for the two weeks of break, but no one seems to mind too much. Everyone takes advantage of the warmer spring weather and tries to get outside, and New York comes to life again, clearly no longer the dreary place it can always feel like in the winter months, and now a bright, full city full of life and promise.

After second semester midterms, Ned, Flash, Betty, and MJ coast through their easier classes and complain to one another about their harder ones across study guides at coffee shops. All three of them are taking way more APs than they should be, but it’ll them get through college easier, their teachers keep promising, so they soldier on. Everything fits well, and some days Ned remembers that his best friend isn’t even always around anymore, and that somewhere in the last year his dreams stopped involving Peter Parker and Stark Industries, and started to involve Betty Brant and their article about Spider-Man. It feels weird to reach out, though, and sometimes Ned’s thumb hovers of Peter’s contact image before he closes out of the contacts app on his phone.

Betty asks him to Spring Formal two days before it happens, shyly admitting that she thought he was going to ask her. (Ned had assumed that he would go in a group with her and MJ and Flash and the rest of the Decathlon team, so it comes as a surprise.) The truth of the matter is that he hasn’t thought of Betty like that until she asked him out, it isn't something he expected at all. 

He really does like her though, and he says yes, and they wear matching outfits to the dance. The outfits match poorly, admittedly, in equal parts because they’re a little too proud to ask for help and they have like, two days. He kisses her (she kisses him, really) before they both get picked up by their parents, and they text a little while on their rides home and decide that they’re dating, and that’s nice, too. It’s not a traditional love story by any means, but they don’t really care.

Things don’t chance that much, except sometimes they kiss awkwardly now and they try to sit next to each other at lunch and in class. MJ continues to hang out with them and doesn’t seem to mind being a third wheel, especially as Flash tags along sometimes as well. She spends her time reading and writing what look to be essays (and have way more footnotes than Ned likes to see in anything) while Ned and Betty work on their own things. MJ has decided that she wants to be a lawyer and specialize in vigilantes, so Ned helps her compile all of the legal documentation and precedent they can find on the matter.

(Ned is pretty sure that it’s her work he sees on reddit everyone once in a while, seeing as she asked him to set her up with the ability to use reddit at school. He tries not to be on it for too long now, though, because he can and will get sucked into _u/AirToSigh_ ’s technical analysis at every opportunity. He has in the past, and those Wikipedia rabbit holes rival the time he wanted to make his own cryptocurrency. MJ is on it a lot though, and she spends plenty of time reading the long ethics pieces that can make Ned’s head a little dizzy between the big words and bigger ideas. Ned prefers the simple words to those, and bits and bytes over either.)

Over time Flash drifts away, focusing his energies toward a YouTube channel and online streaming presence that has far more promise than it has any right to. He makes it big when Spider-Man catches a car right in front of him while he’s live-streaming, and it’s the best shot of the vigilante (since Ned’s twitter bot got shut down, he argues in private to Betty and MJ) in at least a few months. Somehow he manages to get a sponsor or two, and develops his own little posse of followers at school now that he’s “famous”. MJ doesn’t do a good job of hiding her disgust at the whole ordeal, but Ned doesn’t think he does either, so he doesn’t judge her too harshly. Either way, their friend group of four becomes a group of three, even though Ned and Flash still get homework help from one another and give each other the “bro nod” when they pass by each other in the halls.

In the meantime, Betty has taken over the school newspaper with ruthless efficiency, and by the end of the year she’s written dozens of articles and earns herself an internship at the Daily Bugle. She mostly handles paperwork and helps schedule which low-priority stories will be run on which days, a task that she assures Ned is far more interesting than it sounds. They know each other well at this point, and they dull one another’s sharp points even despite all of their differences.

She mentions offhand that Peter sells photos (mostly of Spider-Man) to the Bugle now, and Ned realizes that he almost forgot about his best friend. It’s been almost a year since Bed died, and they’ve both moved on now, and that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, Ned tries to tell himself. Peter’s birthday is in August, a few weeks before school, and that’s harder than Ned expects it to be.

No matter how many times he tries to write the perfect text/email/apology to him, he can’t make himself press send. He settles for sending a _Happy Birthday!!_ text that feels pretty lame, even with the double exclamation points, and internet stalking him for a bit. He learns that Peter, who is seventeen now, already has his GED, and is taking community college courses faster than anyone should be able to. Ned is living and breathing Computer Science, but is still in high school, and he doesn’t think they have much common ground. Neither of them seem like they’re on the path to work at Stark Industries, but that dream feels like it was a long time ago, anyways.

Betty quits her internship at the Bugle after two weeks, because the ethics of the place are _horrible_ , she explains over pizza. It’s admittedly a week longer than Ned expected her to last, a fact he chooses not to share. Betty’s mentor, Ben Urich, is similarly displeased, Ned gathers, but can’t do the whole quitting thing because of grown up problems like rent. He did advise Betty to start writing on her own, instead of dealing with someone like Jameson’s oversight. Someone will publish it when it’s done, he says, which seems a little bit idealistic to Ned, but Mr. Urich is an expert, and Ned tries to listen to experts when he can.

Ned and Betty spend their nine-to-fives writing and coding together, backs pressed against one another as Ned contributes to open source projects and helps proofread Betty’s work. They develop an addiction to a few series on Netflix (which has way more superhero shows now, wow), and fall asleep cuddled together more than any of their parents seem to be fans of.

By the start of Junior Year they spend almost all of their free time working on the article, decathlon abandoned in favor of more specialized pursuits than competitive trivia. Ned had tried out competitive programming but it didn’t stick, so he goes back to working on small projects and twitter bots. (It’s fun to optimize, sure, but he wants to see his work do things and cause change in the world, and sorting arrays quickly doesn’t really do that). His pride and joy is the one that corrects people’s spelling of the name “Spider-Man”, because it has a dash, thank you very much.

(He thinks the account is hilarious. Abe does not.)

MJ does stick with decathlon, though. It’ll look good on her college applications, she explains, and she has always loved it more than Ned or Betty did. They aren't as good as they were when Peter was their science Ace, but they’ve got good talent among the underclassmen, and Flash’s distracting presence is gone, so they win their first few meets of the year. MJ slowly drifts away then, focusing more on Decathlon and school, which was never entirely unexpected, but still hurts a bit. 

Ned and Betty work on college apps together, sharing Google Docs and coffees and kisses and a $150 ACT study guide as they power through the dozens of essays they each need. They want to apply to everywhere on their lists early, just to get it all out of the way, which means that their summers involve way more writing than they’d like. They find ways to have fun too, of course. They bond over bad jokes and movie premieres and seeing who can plan the cooler date that costs less than twenty bucks. Betty’s tour of Spider-Man’s best fights that costs nothing but the Subway fare is something Ned can’t ever top, but they try anyways, continuing to explore the city they grew up in right before they might have to leave it.

Eventually school starts back up, but senior year isn’t hard, and come November first they’ve done exactly what they intended, and their applications are all in and all they need to do is wait.

Waiting sucks, and Betty talks Ned down from hacking the admissions offices of all twelve schools they each applied to and _that’s like twenty total Ned I’m not letting you try to hack them all, so just wait, please_ so they distract themselves with research about Spider-Man and with… other things in the meantime.

Eventually, the results come out. MJ is headed to Columbia for law, determined to follow in the footsteps of some hotshot lawyers Ned has never heard of, and Flash is taking a “gap year” that Ned expects will last longer than a year, since he’s somehow turned himself into a successful streamer.

Betty got into NYU’s journalism program and Ned finds out that Peter is going to ESU, majoring in Biophysics, so somehow, fate has kept all of his friends in New York. He gets into ESU’s Computer Science program, deferred and then rejected from MIT, but he doesn't mind as much, because New York is home, and he wants to stay there. 


	2. Classification

When Ned is eighteen, he is a Freshman at Empire State University majoring in Computer Science, and he is part of the honors college. The honors college thing is probably the least important part of that, honestly. It just means he has to take slightly more advanced classes, and that his transcript will say that he graduated with honors, as long he keeps his GPA high. 

But school is fine, and is very manageable from a time management standpoint, especially thanks to how hard Midtown had been. He has to stay in the dorms for his Freshman year, which is probably the worst part of the whole thing. He’s used to staying at home, which somehow gives him more freedom than his flex double makes him feel like he has. A flex double, as Ned learns, is a dorm room that is designed to hold one person, but is suddenly able to hold two. 

His Roomate is Fred Myers, whose most redeeming qualities are the fact that he owns up to the RAs about the fact that Ned isn’t the source of the scent of weed. Somehow Fred and Ned never get in trouble (the RA is too lazy to write anything up), Ned wants out of school dorms as soon as he can, and considers getting an apartment and just letting his roommate enjoy the space to himself. 

It feels weird, living a twenty minute subway ride away from your house, but Ned makes it through, even though he misses the little things, like apple slices while he is working, or the way the garbage truck always wakes him up an hour earlier than he needs to be on Thursday mornings. The one redeeming aspect of freshman year is Betty. Even as MJ and Flash drift away, Ned and Betty keep getting closer. 

They take a few similar classes and study together when they can, even as an excuse to hang out. Ned finds himself walking to and from Betty’s dorm way more than she comes over to his (the fact that she has a single as part of a suite may have something to do with that), which is honestly great exercise, even if it’s just a ten minute walk. 

Over the course of the year, Ned samples all of the food options along the way, and while most of them are tolerable at best, there are a few hidden gems that he and Betty come to love. 

They stay up until the wee hours of the morning almost every weekend, working on the article. They stay up late, cross legged and next to each other as Ned works through CSVs and Betty works through police reports, and by dawn their computers are closed and they’ve cuddled their way into a tangle of limbs. 

By the end of the freshman year, Betty wants out of her suite too. Apparently, Sarah comes back at around four am every day from parties and Felicia has a habit of skipping on chores, and the fourth roommate, whose name Ned can’t remember, doesn’t like to leave her room. 

They agree to move into an apartment that’s between ESU and NYU for sophomore year, and it feels like they’ve placed the last few pieces of a puzzle in place, and things just _work_. They work in so many ways that couldn’t have been predicted, either. 

For instance, Ned’s parents have always joked that he is allergic to doing manual labor, but he has no problems with carrying all sorts of heavy things from the rented U-Haul truck to the third floor. He and Betty also try to learn to cook, with poor results. Ned is a horrid cook. Betty is somehow worse, so they go through a lot of take out. 

Now, they get to share a queen sized bed instead of a twin, even if they still end up wrapped around each other taking up less than half of the space they have available. They keep working on the article, and Ned thinks they can have it done by the end of the school year. Betty says it’ll take closer to two years, and she’s the boss, so he trusts her judgement on that one. 

Of course, just when things start going well, shit hits the fan. It’s a combination of “just their luck” and “maybe the apartment was super cheap for a reason”, but the pipe is broken either way, and water damage is not cheap. Neither Ned nor Betty’s parents are really in a financial situation where they can cover it, and it turns out their cheap-as-hell renter’s insurance won’t either, so they need to find a way to make a few grand quick. 

The solution is actually pretty simple, once the two of them think through it. The sports betting script is sort of illegal, since sports betting only being open to 21 year olds (which is dumb to begin with, Ned reasons). However, Ned can legally trade stocks, which is exciting. Most of the theory transfers fairly well, too. Reacting to news quickly is something he can already do well, and the theory holds up. 

So, Ned does what he does best: he goes on a coding binge for two weeks (it’s easier with Betty there, forcing him to watch Netflix sometimes and cutting up fruit for him as well) before he sleeps for three days, and then phones in his finals. He passes, but not by as much as he should. His 3.8 GPA is down to a 3.4, which Ned can admit is pretty far from ideal. 

The thing is, the code is working _really_ well, seeing as stocks and the few cryptocurrencies Ned dabbles in offer much better return, they pay for the repairs no problem. They have a lot of money left over, too, and when the profits are in halfway to their sixth digit after a month, Ned isn’t sure that the whole school thing is something he needs anymore, for any reason other than making his parents happy. 

Betty does convince him to go through the motions for at least the rest of this year, and she tells him that she is determined to get her own degree, needed or not. Ned doesn’t want to bother though, truth be told, and he keeps up the facade in front of Betty until Spring break. 

She realizes that he’s slacking when he accidentally leaves out a differential equations test that he got a 65 on. To be fair, with the curve that’s probably a B or even a B+, but Betty knows Ned better than that, and she’s right when she calls him out for not trying on classes at all. 

It’s the first real fight he and Betty have. By the end of it Ned has somehow managed to find himself on the pull out couch, and the next few days feel like the worst of his life. They end up alternating who gets the real bed though, a sort of silent truce that somehow reflects that even if they’re both mad enough to not want to sleep next to each other, they still do love each other.

It takes three days before they apologize to one another, each in their own halting, awkward ways. Ned even goes so far as to organize his thoughts in a bullet point list that even Betty would probably be proud of. He’s not the best at communication, but he does his best, and by the end they’re both crying and they fall asleep cuddled on the couch. 

Ned interns at a financial trading firm and Betty at the Post during the summer, and they spend the evenings working on the article and learning everything there is to know about New York’s wall crawling hero.

Junior year goes by incredibly quickly, somehow. He and Betty decide to keep the apartment and release for another year, even if it’s not the best place. It’s theirs, and that’s worth something. Ned takes two extra classes each semester, and forces himself to study if only to make Betty happy. He’s only a few credits away from graduating, but the extra credits are starting to get him towards some Masters level work, where he can actually challenge himself. 

Betty works herself to the bone, between classes and a part time co-op and the article, Ned is pretty sure she sleeps less than he does. He dedicates himself to taking care of her though, and cuts her slices of pear (apples are too crunchy for her) and carries her to bed when she falls asleep at the kitchen table doing work. 

The hard work all pays off though, because by Spring, the article is ready. To be honest, Ned hasn’t seen anything like it, maybe ever. It’s a _long_ article, and it frankly reads more like a wiki page than anything. It chronicles almost everything known about Spider-Man, with cited sources, unreleased photographs, and interviews with original sources. 

It takes almost two weeks to proofread everything and fact check it before release, and another five to get it into a mainstream publication. In the meantime, Ned turns 21 and sets up a shell company that technically does all of the stock trading he does. It lets him write off the costs of things like electricity, and it feels cool to have a company website for “Starfire consulting firm” that doesn’t actually list any contact information or rates. Instead, the website just says that it offers “high power solutions to data analysis problems”. When it comes to price, it just says that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford us”. Betty gives Ned endless grief for that one, especially since the ‘us’ is really just Ned, who is also the CEO and CTO. 

Finally, by the middle of November in their senior year of school, it’s ready to go. 

It gets published.

They make waves.

He and Betty release the article, and it goes viral, because no one has been able to tell the story quite so well. They’re co-authors, but Ned seems to get way more of the questions than Betty does, even though her name is first. Betty says this is because he’s a dude. Ned agrees that his being a guy is probably the reason, and would like to also submit that people suck. That said, Ned is under qualified to answer almost any question, and is quick to point people to Betty to answer questions, because unless it involves software she 100% knows better. 

By the end of that semester, nearly a moth after the article, Ned finishes his last finals, and gets his diploma. Not that he really needs it. He already has a (fake) company and has a pretty stable source of income, and Betty is the star of NYU’s journalism program, and is fending off people like the Post and the Bugle for all she can. 

And then things are quiet for almost two years, which is far longer than their lives have any right to be. Ned is 23 when he gets an email from one nr074@28c69b4cba.com. It turns out that this person is one Natalie Rushman, a model-turned recruiter for what she calls a small defense company, asking about contracting work from Starfire consulting firm. The email looks like spam, and Ned almost deletes it without reading it, before he noticed the mention of Starfire, which his ownership of isn’t exactly public. 

The thing is, Ned is smart. He has always been smart, and his brain has always moved fast. His brain, when he finishes reading the email, comes to a scary conclusion very, very quickly. Ned realizes very quickly that: 1. No one should be able to link Starfire with Ned’s personal email, at all. 2. Natalie Rushman is mostly likely not actually a recruiter for a small defense company. 3. Natalie Rushman was probably a secret agent or something. 

Ned, for all of his intelligence, is also fatally curious. He knows better than to pry, but that certainly doesn’t stop him from wanting to figure out who it is that Miss Rushman actually works for, and if he can only figure that out by saying that Starfire labs would be happy to take the job, that’s just what he’s going to have to do. 

As it turns out, Natalie Rushman (definitely not her real name, Ned has decided) works for a group called SHIELD, and they’re apparently the people who are responsible for locking up the various super powered bad guys who keep deciding New York City is the place to be. 

About a dozen or so emails and a fair amount of screening on both ends, Ned decides that he is interested enough to go to a meeting, which is honestly against his better judgement. He still is curious though, sue him. Ned is able to figure out a few more things before his in person meeting, which takes place in a medium sized office building that is far too centrally located for it to be a safe place for people like Electro and the Vulture to be, because they need to have a habit of getting free. 

It also turns out that neither Rushman doesn’t appreciate his joke about how poor of a job they tend to do at actually accomplishing that. Her boss, whose email name is simply “fury” followed by the same string of letters that Rushman’s has, doesn’t like the joke either, based on an email that he probably wasn’t meant to be reply all’ed to. 

All of that aside, Ned still makes his way to the Upper Bay and to SHIELD HQ on a free day, armed with nothing but his laptop, an energy bar, and a hydroflask filled with coffee. 

Frankly, Ned could just be setting himself up to get mugged, but the whole things feels very spy and secret agent, for whatever that’s worth. Rushman is waiting for him outside, and before Ned knows it he’s somehow made his way inside and to a meeting room that seems far too classy for an office space that’s tucked between two factories that smell a lot like fish.

A front desk working tell him to follow Rushman, who doesn’t bother to introduce herself (and yes, at this point the whole secret agent vibes are very very strong) as she leads him through a few winding corridors, to another scary lady, who introduces herself as Maria Hill. 

It takes like, maybe thirty seconds of small talk, Maria Hill she explains to him that SHIELD is developing an AI that they hope can function as a personal assistant, but she keeps listing features and it starts to sound more and more like they want him to make weapons. 

And don’t get Ned wrong, making weapons sounds cool, but he likes to think of himself as a pacifist, and the whole working with police thing doesn’t sit right with him either. 

Unfortunately, Maria Hall can be very convincing, especially when she casually brings up all of the illegal things Ned has done and how long his jail time would be were charges to be pressed against him. She also has a gun, and she seems significantly more willing to use it than Ned feels comfortable with. 

Does this qualify as blackmail? Yes. 

Is Ned feeling unsafe as he signs a contract stating that “Starfire Consulting will offer exclusive guidance in the development of new defense technologies”? Also yes. 

Would MJ probably be able to argue that he signed under duress? Yes to this as well, but Ned has a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t work, though.

This of course, leads to final, somewhat obvious question: Is Ned’s natural curiosity going to somehow get him killed because he didn’t just ignore Natalie Rushman’s email in the first place? Probably also yes. 

Ned is determined to do his best to make the answer to that last question no, though, which is why he signs the papers in front of his and is rewarded by a too-firm handshake from Maria Hill, and an actual briefcase of bills. 

Okay, scratch what he said earlier. There aren’t just vibes of secret agent type shit, that’s exactly what’s going on here. It’s full on Ned has accidentally gotten himself employed to write an AI for spies. 

Ned is definitely going to end up like a Star Trek red shirt somehow, Ned realizes on his subway ride home, he just knows it. He should probably learn some self defense or something, or maybe they’ll like him work remote? Either way, he should probably learn self defense. 

He does his best not to think too much about SHIELD or the contract he signed over the next few weeks. Sure, he plays a little bit with AI and image processing work, but SHIELD doesn’t contact him, so he figures he’s probably good. He doesn’t really know what to do with the money, so he puts it in the back of the spare closet, like he’ll get radiation poisoning if it’s too close to him. He definitely isn’t hiding it from Betty, the fact that he doesn’t tell her about the whole situation is a coincidence, he swears. 

It’s two weeks later, when Betty points out that they’ve been getting tailed by the same dude in a suit and a bluetooth earpiece on all three of their last dates, that Ned has to finally explain what’s going on, through awkward hand gestures and two word texts, because whoever the hell is trailing them probably has super hearing or something. When it finally clicks Ned thinks he might need a little more than self defense training to fend off Betty’s evil eye, and has officially decided that SHIELD is the least scary thing in his life. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just how smart is Ned? School is too boring and he gets Headhunted by SHIELD, smart. Anyone who can keep up with what Stark does on the Spider-Man suit is definitely SHIELD material. 
> 
> I also made minor references two a number of Marvel characters here, let me know which ones you catch! 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! I've had this draft idea for a while, but I might have to push the main plot onwards before I can develop this story thread too much further, but I wanted to give Ned a little bit of a spotlight. 
> 
> He's clearly incredibly smart in the MCU, seeing as he can hack a suit that Tony Stark made, and a lot of what he does in this fic is just _barely_ pushing what would be reasonable for real life. 
> 
> Also please leave comments and kudos I need the serotonin. Any guesses at to what the title means?


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